Bright Young Things Read online

  “I did,” Astrid said in a suave and sparkling voice, and then she hooked her elbow with the girl‧s.

  It was impossible for Astrid to imagine what Charlie might have against this girl, and she hated him for his bullying tone. She was reminded of the time she had accompanied Charlie and his father on a hunting trip and realized that they were going to deal a mortal blow to some defenseless creature. Perhaps that was why she had crossed the room—the silver silk rustling against her legs, her fur stole slipping just slightly from her shoulder—to intervene on a stranger‧s behalf.

  Now that they were close, the girl turned her big brown eyes—which had been fixated on Charlie in cool defiance—to Astrid. Even though her dress was made of the humblest cotton, and her shoes were laced-up boots like some nineteenth-century schoolteacher, there was an elegant quality about her prominent cheekbones and long, strong limbs. She blinked perhaps once, but if she was surprised or confused by what Astrid had said, she did not let it show on her features. Astrid offered the stranger a plush smile, and then turned to face the room.

  Charlie was standing before her, legs spread wide and glaring. Behind him guests watched with mouths slightly agape as the very important girl in the elaborately beaded headpiece and five-hundred-dollar dress clung to the unknown girl in plain, wrinkled country cotton. One of the women stifled a giggle, and in the silence of the room everyone could plainly hear a man whispering at her to shut up.

  “Come, darling,” Astrid said, to the room as much as to the girl, giving her new friend a tug. “Let‧s get you a drink, shall we?”

  7

  SEVERAL SECONDS PASSED BEFORE CORDELIA realized that she was the darling in question and that they were moving across the room to get her a drink. Cordelia liked the way the girl said darling—not in the plummy, cloying way that snobby, upper-class women in talkies did, but rather more breezily and naturally, as though the world were full of darlings, as though she‧d lived her whole life in an orchard of them. Her skin was unlike anything Cordelia had ever seen, and it glowed as though it had never been exposed to harsh light or dirty air.

  “Do you favor juleps?” she said as they approached a uniformed waiter, who kept his eyes inclined in the direction of his small black bow tie even when they were only a few feet from him.

  “Doesn‧t everybody?” replied Cordelia, who hadn‧t the vaguest idea what a julep was.

  “Why, yes! How clever.” The girl issued a subtle wink from the left of her great blue-green eyes. “Eddie, will you fetch us two juleps, please?”

  The waiter nodded and went out of the room.

  “I‧m Astrid,” the girl continued, her words gaining in velocity as she steered the newcomer through the sparse crowd of men in summer suits and women in shimmering dresses, all engaged in a fierce farce of not glancing in their direction, toward the great glass wall and the view it held. It had never occurred to Cordelia that a wall could be that high—it must have been twenty feet or so—and still made of such a fragile material, and she had to be stern with herself to not go on staring upward. “What do we call you?”

  “Cordelia.”

  “Well, Cordelia, I‧m so glad you‧re here. I haven‧t the faintest idea where you could have come from, but I am terribly relieved that you arrived just when you did. How delightfully contrary of you to wear that dress! You‧ll have to tell me later where you got it. Anyway, it was looking to be a most dull party, and we are so in need of new blood, and I hope you like dancing as much as you like juleps, because I am planning to drink a lot of juleps and dance a lot of dances, and I don‧t at all feel like being tied down by a partner tonight, at least not a boy partner, the kind who wants to lead you and hold you and make sure none of the other boys looks at you, don‧t you know exactly what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Cordelia replied, and though everything about the scene was very new to her, it was with complete sincerity that she added, “I know exactly.”

  “Oh, good. You see, I feel so entirely pretty tonight, I think I want everyone to have a chance to look at me, and not have anyone make me feel bad about it, and moreover, I think we‧re going to be awfully good friends, and also that—”

  “My dear Miss Donal.”

  “Yeesssssssssss?” Astrid trilled, turning.

  Cordelia‧s arm was still hooked in hers, and so she too was forced to turn in the direction of the low, purposeful voice. There, shoulder to shoulder, were the snake from the night before and a man like him in size but older, and without the younger one‧s restless, agitated quality. The older man‧s dark tan was especially striking against his white linen suit; it was not unlike the tan people in Ohio had by the end of a summer season—the kind acquired through uneasy living. There was a distinguished white burst in his sandy hair at each temple, however, and he drew the stares of everyone present. His eyes were chestnut brown. Cordelia knew at once that he was Darius Grey, and she felt a sinking disappointment. Until a few seconds ago she had believed that when they at last came face-to-face, there would be an instantaneous flash of recognition, but he only watched her with an intense and inscrutable gaze. No one said anything for several breaths, and for the first time Cordelia considered the possibility that Letty might be right—that her father might just be any ordinary man, lost or gone. That the well-dressed man in front of her was no relation, and would shortly and swiftly dash all hope that she would ever know the truth of her origins.

  The famous bootlegger was holding a silver tray with two tall glasses filled to the gold rim with ice and amber liquid and mint leaves, which was somehow incongruous with the power he so clearly exuded in the room. For everyone wavered and regarded him, waiting for his words, and it was indeed he who eventually broke the silence: “Whom have we here, Miss Donal?”

  Astrid‧s arm drew her in. “Mr. Grey, I‧d like to introduce my friend Cordelia …” She paused, as though her memory might produce a surname. “Cordelia …?”

  “Grey.” Cordelia could not manage to make her voice louder than a whisper. Her face had gone cold, her eyes bright.

  “Cordelia Grey?” A shadow crossed the bootlegger‧s face for an instant, but he masked it with a smile. “No relation, I assume.”

  “She‧s nobody,” the boy snorted. “A troublemaker. I saw her at Seventh Heaven last—the other night.”

  Cordelia swallowed and realized that she was a few minutes from being thrown out. If she wasn‧t brave, her chance to explain herself would disappear, and she would soon be standing on the side of the road like the foolish girl everyone in Union always believed her to be.

  “I‧m your daughter,” she said, her voice halting and sudden, and she tried not to look afraid.

  Darius Grey‧s eyes moved away from the young man at his side to the interloper, and then his eyebrows slowly rose, moving upward with a multitude of emotion. The tendril-like muscles of his eye sockets were strung with surprise and sympathy and so many other elements, she could not readily identify them all.

  “My daughter?” On Darius‧s tongue, it sounded like an entirely different word from the one she‧d just used. The word she‧d used had sounded prosaic, almost pleading; his daughter was like some rare, possibly fantastical creature.

  Astrid‧s grip loosened a little, and everyone in the room gave up the pretense of not gawking at the scene by the glass window. Cordelia took a breath and spoke in as clear and even a tone as she could manage: “My mother‧s name was Fanny Larson, and I was born in April of 1911 in New York City. I don‧t remember it—the city, I mean—because she died when I was still a baby and I was taken back to Union, Ohio, where she was from. My aunt Ida, who reared me, always said I had to be saved—she talked of my father as though he was a man like you … and I wanted to find out if indeed you might be him.”

  Outside the sky was turning from lavender to a darker shade, and down under the great white tent the music and the celebrating had grown rowdy. But in the glass-enclosed porch, silence prevailed again and every mouth hung open.

>   Darius Grey pursed his lips, mulling a small mystery. “You found your way onto my property, inside my house, to this intimate little gathering of my most trusted colleagues.” He made a flourish with his hand. “We keep this place awfully well guarded. How did you manage that?”

  Cordelia admonished herself not to blush. She hadn‧t found it difficult to tell the guard in the hall that she was a dancing girl, but it was another thing entirely to say so to the man she‧d long believed to be her father. “I told the guard at the front door I was the girl who jumps out of the cake,” she relayed flatly.

  In the corner of the room, a woman laughed through her nose. Cordelia‧s eyes darted from face to face as laughter spread through the crowd. Soon the snake was laughing, too, and she could feel that Astrid‧s shoulders shook a little with the humor of this. Even Darius Grey, with his calm demeanor, cracked a smile.

  “The girl who jumps out of the cake?” he hooted. “The way, in a movie, a dancing girl might pop up—surprise!—on a gangster‧s birthday.”

  Cordelia‧s heart was beating quickly now, and she turned her eyes to her humble, scuffed shoes, realizing in horror that this was the exact reason she knew that dancing girls sometimes were hired to jump out of cakes—that she and Letty had once seen a moving picture in which it had happened. Only, in the movie, the girl is on a revenge mission, because her sweetheart has been murdered for having been an accidental witness to a crime, and after everyone shouts, “Surprise!” she draws a pistol from her headpiece and shoots the gangster dead.

  But contrary to her worst fears, Darius‧s voice now took on an approving tone. “Only a daughter of mine could convince a man like Danny that she was a dancing girl in a dress like that.” He shook his head and stared at Cordelia admiringly. “She must have the Grey eyes—capable of hypnotizing man or beast.”

  Now all the faces in the room turned slightly to get a better look at the stranger in the unfashionable dress. Cordelia straightened and let her neck lengthen, and cautiously allowed the feeling of elation that this approving statement created to spread from her lungs across her shoulders and down to her fingertips. Meanwhile, Darius‧s eyelids fell closed.

  “Fanny …,” he said in a far-off, almost sentimental way. The twenty-odd bodies in the room leaned closer, and Cordelia became acutely aware that even Astrid, who had so recently come to her defense, was regarding her with bemused detachment. Then Darius opened his eyes, and the whole room waited for what he would say. Eventually, he let out a long sigh. “Your mother had a coat just like that one.”

  “It was hers.” For a moment Cordelia, who hated to cry in public, thought she might be choking up.

  But then all of Darius‧s features rearranged themselves, and his voice grew angry. “Eddie!” he bellowed.

  The waiter Astrid had sent off earlier appeared now, skittering toward them. “Yes?” he asked, a touch fearfully.

  “Take this,” Darius said impatiently, thrusting the tray of drinks toward him in such a way that Cordelia and everyone around trembled a little, thinking they would fall and shatter on the floor. But Eddie proved deft at his job, and soon he had the tray righted in his hands and was turning to go. Darius continued in an exasperated vein. “Ed … the lady‧s things?”

  Cordelia looked down, remembering her coat and the battered suitcase she‧d been trying to hide underneath it. Eddie nodded and hurriedly reached for both while balancing the tray in his left hand.

  “Put them in the Calla Lily Suite,” Darius commanded. Though Cordelia could scarcely imagine what those three words meant, they made her feel protected, as though she had been wrapped in some rich, clean-smelling blanket and given a cup of tea made from the rarest herbs. “That shall be Cordelia‧s.”

  When both were unburdened, Darius stepped forward with open arms. One hand drew her in and the other rested on the crown of her head, gently roughing her hair. In its abatement, she realized that her entire life up until that moment had been marked by an urgent desire to flee wherever and whomever she was. For the first time, in a perfumed room with walls of glass, being taken into the protective arms of the father she‧d never known, she experienced a moment of being exactly where, and exactly what, she was supposed to be.

  When the embrace ended, Darius stood away from her at arm‧s length to get another look. “How like Fanny you are.” His voice had softened again. “Charlie,” he said, addressing the younger man, whose face was still a portrait of irritation, “say hello to your long-lost sister.”

  Cordelia‧s eyes grew wide, but she managed to keep herself upright and calm as Charlie leaned forward, took her hand, and gave her a cold kiss on the cheek.

  “You‧re Charlie Grey?” she said, and then regretted it immediately. Embarrassment seeped into the moment, and she felt sure that her tone had betrayed all the many articles she had read about the Grey family of Long Island, hoping from her dusty, provincial home, to meet her real family someday.

  Charlie, however, had already looked away from her, and Darius did not seem to have noticed her gaucheness.

  “Ah, so you know of him? Good. I‧d already had him when I fell in love with Fanny; it was one of the reasons Ida didn‧t care for me, Lord knows she had the right to feel the way she did. Long time ago, it all was. But now,” Darius continued, clasping his hands together, becoming abruptly businesslike, “I am very impressed by all you have accomplished in these sorry clothes, and I understand that they couldn‧t do any better for you in that godforsaken part of the world, but I will not have my daughter in rags. Miss Donal, dear, will you find Jones and ask him what we have on the premises? Surely there‧s a good frock that will fit Cordelia. Tomorrow, of course, we will get her her own things, but in the meantime, help her get dressed, would you? There is a party on—I will not have half the world meeting my daughter in anything but the best.”

  Now Astrid‧s grip became once again warm and possessive. There was a gentle swishing of expensive fabrics as the women in the room stepped backward to make a path for the two girls, for they had realized over the past minutes that when she returned to the party, Cordelia Grey would be better than any of them.

  By ‘29 it was quite generally known that Grey the bootlegger threw memorable parties. Early on in his career, it was said, he realized that he would sell more liquor if liquor came with a glamorous aura, and since he believed people to be generally dull and useless, he set about living a decadent lifestyle as a kind of demonstration. So there were always parties at his estate, and the parties always produced stories. But the evening on which he appeared under the great white tent—a little late, as usual—not with a showgirl or a socialite of rather outré taste on his arm, but instead with a young girl everyone was calling his daughter, was a particularly unforgettable one.

  “This evening is to celebrate my daughter, who Providence has seen fit to return to me!” he bellowed to the crowd, sometime later that evening, and everyone pushed forward to get a better look. “I introduce to you … Cordelia Grey!”

  There was a fresh quality about her eyes and they moved rapidly over the scene, as though she was eager to miss nothing. After much hushed discussion of what type she was, it was generally agreed that she looked uncompromisingly like nobody but herself. The thin, metallic band that circled her head and almost disappeared against her tawny hair was a very Astrid Donal-style touch. The dress she wore was nothing special—a swath of sleeveless teal silk that showed off strong, speckled calves and trailed a little behind her—but then, her clothing was hardly what made her interesting.

  Two A.M. arrived more quickly than it ever had before, and by then the dancing was no longer any good. But the velvet dome of the sky had been punctured a million times over by stars, and the girl whom everyone wanted to meet had traipsed away from the crowd under the tent and into the darkness where she could get a better look. Earlier, when her status in this place had been a matter of minutes and not of hours, Astrid had smoothed Cordelia‧s wavy hair with a cream that smelled like c
hemicals and gardenia, and pinned it in a dramatic bun at the nape of her neck. As she stepped forward into the grass, that bun began a beautiful process of unraveling.

  In addition to the dress, which was of a smooth, soft material that possessed a magical quality when it brushed against her skin, Astrid had outfitted her in a pair of black suede heels. Cordelia would not have dreamed of ruining them by walking on the lawn, so it was in bare feet that she strode forward. The grass felt like a cool, soft cushion, fresh smelling and not at all damp. Soon enough Astrid, who was having trouble walking in heels on uneven terrain, lost her footing and pulled both girls down in a fit of giggles.

  Cordelia‧s head came to rest against a sprawling pillow of her own hair on the ground. Astrid gripped her arm, her fingernails pressing against the skin. She‧d drunk more champagne than Cordelia, who had not yet forgotten the consequences of the previous night, and her movements had become relaxed and floppy.

  “Darling, look!” Cordelia pointed at a white burst crossing the sky. Darling was already becoming one of her regular words. “A shooting star.”

  “Oh,” Astrid whispered.

  Cordelia had seen plenty of stars falling in her time, but they seemed somehow closer here, with the music still within earshot and the convivial glow beneath the tent emanating across the lawn. It was almost as though she might be able to reach up and grasp the next star brazen enough to pass into her planet‧s orbit. Before she could help herself, she remembered that it was John who had first explained to her that a shooting star was not a star at all, but a great hunk of something from outer space breaking apart when it came too close to Earth. John‧s mother was as God-fearing as Aunt Ida and wouldn‧t have believed in such “nonsense,” but his father, perhaps just to spite his wife, read a science magazine every night while he smoked his pipe and had explained this to his son. And then John had related it to Cordelia, one night when they‧d crept away from a church picnic. They‧d lain on their backs a long time that night, watching little explosions miles and miles above the ground, and John had asked her if she believed in fate. She‧d laughed hard and reminded him she wasn‧t a child anymore and he wasn‧t, either, and that neither of them should believe in fairy tales. But that field in Ohio was a long way away now, and from her new sky-gazing position, it was difficult not to feel that she was fulfilling a kind of destiny.