Beautiful Days

  Willa’s eyebrow rose again, this time a touch skeptically. “They’re all the same, dear. But let’s not dwell. What is Charlie going to wear for the ceremony?” she went on, reaching for her glass of iced tea, so that her engagement ring fell against her wedding band, creating a faint clicking sound.

  In the next moment the little cloud passed, and the light came down stronger than before on the two girls sitting near the edge of the open-air luncheon room. It caught in Astrid’s ring, lighting it up. For a moment a blaze of diamond was all she saw. She glanced out across the green, but Luke was gone, and good riddance. A boy like Luke would never give her jewelry or host lavish picnics with her, would never inspire Leisure & Play stories, or anything else.

  She didn’t have to be a bride the way Willa had been a bride, or a wife the way Willa was a wife, with a retinue of servants and a husband who was usually off playing golf. She and Charlie would make a name for themselves as a very new kind of young marrieds—they would be always together and have small, simple evenings that were notable for the conversation that was had rather than the jewels that were worn. And when they did the thing that husbands and wives did together it would be very lovely and delicate and not at all the horrible way Willa had described it.

  “Have you been listening to a word I’ve said? Charlie’s his own man, I can’t tell him what to wear,” Astrid replied gaily, signaling the waiter for the dessert menu as she determined to banish those troublesome emotions she couldn’t fully understand. “Let’s talk about what I’m going to wear!”

  Chapter 9

  “MISS, ARE YOU WAITING FOR SOMEONE? I CAN SURELY fetch you when they arrive. There’s no need for you to go on standing there.”

  Letty—who had been leaning in the open doorway trying to enjoy the shade of the foyer while also keeping an eye on Dogwood’s big front gates—turned at the sound of the slightly frantic voice. It was Milly, Cordelia’s English maid, descending the main stairs with a basket of laundry in her slender arms and a particularly beleaguered quality to her uneven eyes. She must have been the only soul working that day. A humid languor hung over Dogwood; the boys were swatting flies in their undershirts, and ice cubes were in short supply because everyone had been melting them on their foreheads last night trying to get to sleep.

  “Oh, no, Milly, thank you, that’s all right.” Letty shook her head and returned her attention to the sloping hill, the two rows of lindens that lined the drive down to the main road, where any minute Grady should be arriving. She could not possibly explain to Milly why she felt the need to wait for the only person she had ever personally invited to Dogwood, instead of loitering casually upstairs as Cordelia or Astrid would have done. He wasn’t as fancy as the other people who dropped by for iced tea or highballs, she might have said, but wouldn’t that sound cruel to a girl who had traveled across a vast ocean just to zip up other girls’ evening dresses? But then Milly was gone and an old black roadster appeared, motoring up the hill. Letty’s stomach whirred.

  When the car slowed to a stop and he opened the driver-side door, she suddenly realized that she had no idea how a girl was supposed to act around a boy who was taking her to the movies. Panic gripped her thoughts—would he expect a kiss on the lips? She should have asked Cordelia earlier, before it was too late. Would he think she was pretty enough to go to all the trouble?

  Quickly she turned to the hall mirror for confirmation that she didn’t look awful. She was wearing a pleated white skirt and a light brown blazer that had once belonged to Astrid; it was a bit too large for her, and so made her petite body appear even smaller. On her head she wore a soft brown beret, pushed back, which gave her a continental air. She had trimmed her own bangs to make the plucked arcs of her eyebrows visible, and then used some of Astrid’s rose-scented oil to give her dark hair extra gloss.

  “Hello, beautiful!”

  “Oh!” she gasped. In her distraction she had not heard Grady come in. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was behind her. “Me?”

  He laughed and kissed her lightly on the hand. “I forgot how funny you are.” Then, offering her his arm, he said, “Come on, or we’ll be late for the picture.”

  As they motored toward the city, she decided that she liked the rather literary way he dressed, in the tweed pants of a knickerbocker suit and with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to the elbows. In the days since she had seen him her memory of the way he looked had faded and now she saw that the reality was better than the picture in her mind. At first this worsened her shyness, but by the time the skyline of Manhattan was coming into view over the low, dirty suburbs of Queens County, she had relaxed into the forward motion of Grady’s old roadster, and all her apprehension had been transmogrified to excitement.

  “I haven’t been to the movies in ages!” Letty said, as the skyscrapers on the horizon grew taller and the distance between them and White Cove increased. “Not since I got to New York.”

  “Well, that’s just criminal.” Grady cast his eyes toward her and smiled. “No young men have thought to take you?”

  She blushed slightly, but the speed of the car and the wind in her face were conspiring to make her bold. “I suppose I was waiting for the right fellow to ask me,” she replied in her most twinkling and girlish voice.

  For a minute Grady did not reply. His eyes were on the road and his cheeks looked suddenly ruddy. Perhaps her flirtation was too bold after all, because he made no response to it and only asked, “Did you go often back home?”

  “Oh, yes, all the time!” Letty gushed, spilling words to cover up her awkwardness. “Whenever I could. Cordelia was the only one who’d always go with me no matter what—the theater was in the next town over, and we had to walk a long ways, but I didn’t mind.” For a moment she was Letitia Haubstadt again, who used to run the mile to the theater in anticipation, and who felt weightless all the way back home, for the glamour of moving pictures had never failed to transport her. “Sometimes that was the best part of my whole week.”

  Grady smiled when he saw that she was smiling. “Which were your favorites?”

  “Oh, anything with Ruby Carlyle in it.” Letty turned her eyes to the sky and began to play with a strand of dark hair. “I adored The Lady of Havana and The Knights of Calizar and Little Mab. And of course, the ones with Valentine O’Dell in them!”

  “Why in hell,” Grady blurted, his voice getting suddenly low and gravelly as he gave the steering wheel a slap, “do the girls so love that damn Valentine O’Dell?”

  Letty’s heart sputtered and she turned in the seat to gaze at him with enlarged eyes. She had never seen him angry before, and had never heard him curse. She hadn’t meant any harm with the Valentine O’Dell comment—but then again, the world of dating was new to her, and perhaps she’d stumbled upon a rule she was ignorant of; perhaps, once you’d agreed to a date with one man, you were obligated never to find another handsome, ever. “But you mustn’t think—”

  “Miss Larkspur,” Grady interrupted, making his voice very deep and mock-serious, and slowly turning his face in her direction. “I was only making fun. And, to prove it,” he went on lightly, “to show you that I am not in the least jealous of Mr. O’Dell, no matter how handsome he may be, and no matter how the ladies do swoon over him, I am going to take you to one of his pictures this afternoon!”

  Letty giggled in relief, settling deeper into the passenger seat of Grady’s car. “Oh, thank you!” she gasped and clapped her hands.

  “I’m cleverer than most, you know. I can’t compete with the Valentine O’Dells of the world with my good looks alone.” He paused, and clownishly pumped his eyebrows as though he were a heartthrob of the big screen. “So I must use the Valentine O’Dells to my advantage.”

  “You know,” Letty mused coyly, “I’m not truthfully sure Mr. O’Dell is even my favorite leading man . . .”

  “Oh, no? Who do you prefer? I must keep informed of any new competition.”

  “Well, if you insist,
I will tell you that I thought Willard Dory was quite romantic in One Night in London. And of course no one can dance like Burt Perry. . . .” She closed her eyes and leaned back into her seat and tried to think of all the other stars whose mystical, sorrowful, gleaming eyes she’d felt boring into hers from the blackness of the little theater in Defiance, Ohio.

  For a long time she had avoided memories of that theater, as well as anything else to do with her upbringing. This was partly because she lived in fear of betraying her backwardness to the privileged young people of White Cove, and also because she didn’t like to think how her younger siblings must worry about their runaway sister. But for some reason, with Grady, it didn’t feel so bad to talk about where she was from.

  Their conversation continued in this easy manner. He was just as courtly as always, but she sensed something new in his posture toward her. There was an almost protective quality in the way he spoke to her, now that she was a passenger in his car. As they rolled into the city, the blare of signs and the sounds of cars and people everywhere—the yelling of housewives leaning from second-story windows, fanning themselves, smoking cigarettes, watching the activity down below—stole their attention. By then Letty had begun to feel that she was just like a girl in a movie, taking a long drive on a summer day with a young man who is too poor to impress her family, but who shows much promise, and who in any event is very good at filling a simple afternoon with wonder.

  When they stepped out of the afternoon heat and into the large building on Fiftieth Street, she saw that the movie houses of New York were not at all like the little storefront in Defiance that used to stoke her imagination. Her vision began to adjust, and then seats upholstered in red velvet appeared out of the darkness, and instead of one old church organ, dozens of musicians were assembled in the orchestra pit down in front. They were playing a song that sounded like the breezes of a summer night. There were two levels of seats, like at the opera, and the high ceilings were painted in gold and turquoise and decorated as ornately as a pharaoh’s tomb. Around them young people on dates, and children aimless on a summer afternoon, and tough-talking men, and fancily attired women who removed their hats arranged themselves in the long rows.

  “I think there might be as many people in this room as lived in all of Union,” Letty whispered as they lingered at the top of a carpeted aisle that sloped down toward the tapestry that covered the big movie screen. There was a real stage, and she already felt giddy in anticipation of seeing the projections of giant actors moving across it in black and white.

  “You may be right.” Grady took her arm, and guided her to a seat in the middle of a row. “They say this theater was built for fifteen hundred.”

  Marveling at the idea that she was surrounded by a town’s worth of souls, Letty closed her eyes. She took a breath. There was some alchemy in the mingling everyday odors of perfume and popcorn and cigarettes; to her it smelled like heaven. The orchestra stopped playing briefly, and she listened to the hushed voices and the hurried footfalls as latecomers settled themselves. For a moment she thought she felt Grady’s fingers brush against her hand. But when she opened her eyes to glance at him, she saw that he had just been removing his hat, which was now perched on his knee. She was already giddy, knowing the movie was soon to start, and couldn’t be sure if the sudden quickening in her belly had anything to do with his touch.

  The orchestra began again. A soft tide of strings lifted the curtain slowly up, and with it all of Letty’s inner spirit became elevated, too. There were a few coming attractions and other short films at the beginning, and then big scriptlike lettering announced the Valentine O’Dell picture, and everyone around her became very quiet—almost ceased to exist, at least as far as Letty’s consciousness was concerned, so complete was her absorption.

  The story began to unfold: A Chicago heiress named Alexandra Barrington was being pressured to marry a young man of her own social class whom her parents deemed a proper match, but she—a modern girl and a free spirit—had refused. Alexandra was played by Sophia Ray, whose lovely face Letty was familiar with from many other films; she had been a child star in vaudeville and married her stage partner Valentine O’Dell when they were both sixteen, and nowadays she played opposite him in most of his films. Although Letty had known about Sophia Ray and Valentine O’Dell’s romance since as long as she could remember, she never tired of reading it again whenever it was covered in any of the movie magazines. Others around Letty laughed at the foppishness of the Barringtons and their society, who were indeed played rather clownishly—but Letty was most moved by Alexandra’s great, welling eyes as she faced the horrors of being shackled to a man she didn’t love for all eternity. Eventually she snuck out into the world dressed as a boy and a great many adventures ensued.

  Soon thereafter Valentine O’Dell made his entrance, wearing rags and playing a guitar, his strong jaw somewhat obscured by five o’clock shadow. But Letty could tell by the twinkling in his eyes that this character would be as dashing and romantic as Valentine O’Dell characters always were. At first it seemed that Alexandra and the hobo would despise each other, but eventually the musicians at the front of the theater took up a gay, manic tune, and the characters on the screen continued on their adventures together. For a while everything was either very funny or very sweet—the heiress and the hobo were falling in love!—until it all began to go terribly wrong. It seemed that the hobo might die, and that Alexandra might return to her foppish fiancé, and Letty found herself praying to God that she would not be so foolish as to marry him, even if he was rich and handsome, because it would be a betrayal of her true love.

  “Oh!” she even cried out loud, when things were looking especially bad. That was when she felt Grady’s hand again, this time most definitely reaching for hers, and she took it and pressed it with the force of her hopes for Alexandra and the hobo. But in the end the fiancé proved to be a cad, and the hobo survived, and it came out that all along he had been a successful songwriter who was only out in the wilderness seeking inspiration for his new stage show, and the story ended with a lovely wedding.

  As soon as the lights came on in the theater, a racket of seats folding back and bodies moving toward the entrances and loud voices talking about what they had seen rose up around Letty. But she wasn’t ready to move and break the spell just yet—she felt as though she had traveled a long way in the course of an hour and a half, and that she was as tired and spent as though she’d gone to the moon and back. Tears streaked both her cheeks. Grady, beside her, waited patiently until she was ready to leave. Most of the audience had fled, and ushers had moved in to sweep spilled popcorn, when she realized they were still holding hands.

  “Oh,” she said awkwardly, as she removed hers so that they could stand up.

  Grady looked away and carefully placed his hat back on his head.

  The world outside had undergone a change. Night had fallen and the smells of the city—of gasoline and garbage and fried food—had been washed away. Something almost sweet lingered in the air now. It had rained, and the streets were slick from the downpour, so that the streetlamps were reflected on the wet pavement and the puddles that spread out from the curb. They meandered in the general direction of the car, but when they reached it, neither seemed to notice particularly, and without discussion they kept on walking.

  To Letty, the neon signs and the storefronts appeared unworldly bright as they glided by. Grady bought sugar-dusted donuts from an almost empty shop, and then they kept moving on down Broadway, where the lights became even more glaring, and the sights wilder.

  “Do you think someday we’ll be famous?” she asked, as they passed a theater where the names of the principal actors were illuminated from a huge, glowing marquee.

  “I don’t doubt it for a second. You will be a famous actress, and I will be a famous writer, and when they adapt my stories into films, I will write the screenplays, and I will make sure you get all the best lines. . . .”

  Grady winked a
t her as he took the last bite of his donut and discarded the white paper, and they continued on, through streams of theatergoers and peanut-hawkers and pickpockets. Everything they passed appeared illuminated, but they themselves were apart from it, sailing just slightly above the crowd. They had gone somewhere together in the darkness of the theater, and the world seemed almost novel now. It was so vivid and so full of possibilities—but that was a secret between the two of them.

  “I’ve missed the city,” she whispered, wide-eyed.

  “You mean you don’t like it out on White Cove?” he asked.

  “No, no,” Letty replied quickly, for that wasn’t quite what she meant. “It’s very luxurious there.”

  “It’s very luxurious, but”—he paused to give her a piercing look as they walked, their feet falling in mysterious tandem—“you prefer the hustle and bright lights of the city?”

  “It’s silly, I guess.” Letty turned her head on its side and recalled the two-bedroom basement apartment—which she’d shared with three other girls and was, in the end, forced to leave in ignominy—and tried to pinpoint exactly what it was she missed. “When I lived here I spent most of my time at Seventh Heaven and never went to a single audition. My thrilling nights and incredible breaks were all in my head.”

  “Maybe they are just in your future.”

  Letty smiled at Grady, whose eyes seemed to gleam equally with the vision of the city and the vision of her. Manhattan was there for her—she could see it reflected on his face—and in a few weeks she would be here every night, singing in one of its clubs, making a name for herself at last.

  She so liked what Grady had just said that she wanted him to say it again, in a different way, so that she could be sure that he meant it.