Chapter 4
At breakfast the next morning-Martha Dowdale served the girls of Comstock Hall a tasty breakfast as part of their monthly rent, while supper was optional and also at a bargain rate-Eleanor Landers confided in silver-haired Suzy Mersh. The latter, a languorous beauty who ran more to physical enticement than mental brilliance for all her being a year older than Eleanor, was agog at the tidbit served up at coffee time by her coppery-haired crony.
"You mean he actually climbed all the way up to the third floor? My gosh, that must have been awfully dangerous, Elly!"
The redhead grimaced as she lit a cigarette. "Suzy, if I've told you once, I've told you a dozen times. I don't like to be called Elly. My name's Eleanor, and I want to be known as that. Besides, Tom Jenkins' steady girl is called Elly, and I'm definitely not that kind of Elly."
"I know, I know. Gee-you mean he came into your room and all you had on was that snazzy bathrobe?"
"Uh uh. And a garter belt and my best nylons. And the rest was little me." ' "And-and he didn't get fresh?"
"He didn't get much of a chance, Suzy. Oh, you could tell his tongue was hanging out, but I put him dead to rights right from the start," Eleanor Landers boasted. She could rely on Tom Jenkins' promise not to tell the real story, so she was free to embellish the escapade to her heart's content. And the more lurid and incredible it was, the more weight it would carry with that snooty DGT prexy. She took a puff at her cigarette and leaned back triumphantly. "I told him I just wanted to see if he was man enough to come visit me and defy the rules, that's all."
"You didn't!" Suzy Mersh admiringly exclaimed. "Gee, I got to hand it to you, Eleanor, I wouldn't have dared to do a thing like that at all."
"I know. But I want into Delta Gamma Theta, and this ought to help."
"It's bound to," Suzy Mersh enthusiastically exclaimed, borrowing one of Eleanor's cigarettes from the open pack on the table beside her." Anyhow, you wait till I tell Gert Vernon, she's a DGT herself and a good friend of Trudy's. For a fact, any girl who turns a B.M.O.C. down has got to be aces in Trudy's books, and that goes for Gert too. She's from St. Louis, you know, and she turns up her nose at the guys on this campus."
Eleanor Landers basked in her chum's approval, and began to forget the bitter taste of Tom Jenkins' taunt last night. "You're a pal, Suzy, and I won't forget it. If you like, when I go home for the Christmas holidays, I'll invite you along. Laura'll like you lots, you're her style." This much was true, for Laura Landers, Eleanor's haughty mother, had many of Suzy Mersh's characteristics, notably an extreme concern for the fripperies of dress and the relative social status of her neighbors. There could be no doubt that red-haired Eleanor had inherited some of her snobbery with her mother's milk at very birth.
"Oh, that's wonderful, Elly-I-I'm sorry, I mean Eleanor," Suzy gushed. "I'd just love to meet your folks. I've only seen Chicago once or twice, and I'm just dying to see the shops like Marshall Field's and all their windows at Christmas. And Bonwit Teller's and Saks. Well, I guess I better get to class. But I'll see Gert this afternoon at the library, and I'll tell her all about last night. I just know they'll pledge you, Eleanor."
"When do they usually do that?"
"First week in October around here. And then they have Hell Week-that's hazing-the first week of November. Only Mrs. Eggleston, the dean of women, she's told the Greek letter houses to go easy on the initiations, so it won't be much."
"I don't care," Eleanor laughed. "I wouldn't mind a little hazing to be invited into Delta Gamma Theta. It's the only exclusive thing around this dreary campus, take it from me."
"Well, they'd ask you to move into the house then, and you'd have to give up your wonderful room, wouldn't you?" Suzy Mersh got up, clutching her books to an abundant sweater-snugged bosom.
"I'd give it up like a flash, don't you worry. And you can have it," Eleanor laughingly promised.
"You mean it?" Suzy Mersh breathed, wide-eyed with delight. Eleanor nodded. "You just spread the word to Gert that you know a girl that ought to be a pledge, and when I become a DGT, I'll even pay Mrs. Dowdale the rent and let you move in-that's a promise."
"Gee!" Suzy gasped again. "You got a deal! Well, see you, honey!"
Eleanor watched her go and poured herself some more coffee, lit another cigarette. Suzy wasn't much on brains, but she seemed to be loyal and could be useful. Really, it was a pity to have to be cooped up in this nowhere town instead of being in the center of things. Maybe when she got home Christmas, she could talk Dad into letting her come back home. It was like being a princess in exile...
"Hello there, Eleanor."
The redhead glanced up irritatedly. It was Kathy Edwards. She'd forgotten that Kathy, being unaffiliated like herself, would also stay at Comstock Hall. "Oh, hi, Kathy, how's things?"
"Fine. It was such a surprise to find you registered here, Eleanor. I sort of last track of you after we got out of high school."
The redhead sniffed. She didn't exactly care to be reminded that she and Kathy Edwards had once been the best of friends. After all, there was a world of difference now between them. Her folks had money and
Kathy's didn't. And there wasn't any purpose in keeping up this childhood friendship now, because Kathy had turned out to be a goody-goody like that Elly Douglas. She even wore glasses now, and even if they were harlequin, they still made her look like a midnight oil-burner. But then she'd always seemed to do well in class, while Eleanor had larked through her studies and just got marks good enough to get by.
"Well, we moved, you know, to Briarwood Terrace," she explained.
"I hoped you'd give me a ring though, Eleanor. We were still in the phone book," Kathy said gently.
"Well, you know how it is. And then we went to Europe. I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to get in touch with half the people I know," Eleanor Landers gave a disdainful shrug by way of telling Kathy in what superior circles she moved these days. "But how did you happen to pick this place, instead of staying in Chicago?"
"I won a scholarship, and Dad thought it had a wonderful curriculum, especially in English literature. That was always my favorite subject, you know, back in high school."
Eleanor remembered. Kathy had always been mooning over books, silly, romantic stories like "Don Quixote" and Compton Mackenzie's "Winds of Love" and Richard Aldington's "All Men Are Enemies." They had been in the same English class, and Kathy was always getting her themes praised in front of the whole class. Maybe that was why Eleanor had secretly resented her, even when they had been playmates. As if knowing a lot of things out of books was really terribly important nowadays. Having money and position and social acceptance-that was all that mattered, and the smart people knew that. And that was why she was going to do her best to be a big frog in the small pond of Marwell, since that was the only worthwhile thing that mattered right now.
"That's good. So I'll see you around, I guess."
"Sure. You're in Professor Mark Torrance's class this afternoon, aren't you? So am I. Well, I've an early class, so I'll say goodbye for now." Kathy gave her a smiling nod and walked away. Eleanor scowled after her, her triumphant morning entirely ruined. She'd forgotten about Kathy and how much Kathy knew about her when they'd been kids together. And if Kathy was a blabbermouth, she could make things tough. Maybe she'd better give the poor dear a little encouragement every so often, just to keep her in line.
Professor Mark Torrance was glad he didn't have a morning class today, because last night he'd been in Chicago visiting a girl he had thought he was going to marry. As it turned out, she was going to fly to Rome to marry a handsome Italian curator of a museum who had blue blood in his veins-she'd met him in Florence last summer, and then he'd visited New York and the Museum of Modern Art last winter, so they'd seen each other.
He couldn't blame Jacqueline Mobry for changing her mind and heart. After all, here he was, a professor in a small Illinois town, and she was the daughter of a rich Chicago hotel owner and used to travel and luxuries he himself could never afford. Yet they'd had a passionate romance for three years, and he'd always had the faint hope that somehow things would work out so that she'd forego the material side of things in favor of love. Because Jacqueline Mobry, now 25 and at the peak of her glowing russet-haired, tawny-skinned svelte beauty, had been an incomparable lover.
He could use the past tense now and remind himself that he was going to have to forget her forever. Last night had been their last together. She'd phoned him yesterday noon, and fortunately he'd been eating lunch in the faculty cafeteria, so the switchboard girl had been able to find him. And when he'd picked up the phone, he'd heard that wonderfully husky voice of hers-he'd used to tease her by calling it a "voluptuous vibrato" and she was saying that she was flying to Rome the next day to get married and she had to see him for the last time. So he'd finished the afternoon class and cut short, as politely as he could, the usual after-class gabfest that usually developed in English lit, and gone back to his bungalow and driven his five-year-old Chevie into Chicago in time to meet her at the Conrad Hilton for dinner and dancing. She'd already arranged for a room for herself, and she'd told him to go down to the bar for a last drink and then come up to the twenty-first floor and she'd be waiting.
Mark Torrance had met the willowy debutante at a summer resort at The Dells four years ago. In fact, he'd saved her from drowning when she'd had a sudden cramp and gone under twice before he got to her. He'd been an assistant professor at Marwell then the full professorship had just come through last spring, and this would be his first full year as a departmental head of faculty. He'd found Jacqueline Mobry witty, well read and wholesomely unaffectatious-if anything, too much of a practical realist. She knew she had been born to family and money, but it hadn't made her a snob. Yet he also knew that her parents expected certain things from her, and she was devoted to them. And her mother had been Italian, which was how they'd happened to go to Florence and Rome and meet Ricardo Frascati, whom she was going to marry.
Yet they'd been lovers for three happy years, quite unknown to her family, and never calculatedly arranged. He had spent his last few summer vacations in Chicago, and they'd meet at a bar on Adams Street or perhaps she'd be at a table at "The Happy Medium" on Rush Street when he walked in. Though Jacqueline's parents lived in Highland Park, she kept a little apartment on North Dearborn near Huron, and it was there they had their trysts. They had a whole week together this past July, and it had been paradise. He'd told her he wanted to marry her, but she'd shaken her head and told him it wasn't possible, that she'd already met the man she was going to marry, she was very fond of him, and her parents admired him.
"It isn't money and it isn't because you're a professor, darling," she'd told him on their last night of that blissful July week. "My folks just expect me to marry Ricardo, because he's right for me. And Mother will have an excuse to go to Rome every year, and you know she's Italian. And Dad, poor dear, always works too hard and needs a vacation he won't take till Mother drags him along. This time, he won't be able to refuse, because he'll have to visit his only child and maybe his grandchild too, you know."
It had been torture for Mark Torrance to hear her speak so calmly of giving another man a child, when at that very moment he was entwined with her, his mouth on the high-perched pear globe of one tawny-skinned breast, her fingers digging into his shoulder-blades, smelling the perfume of her skin and her tumbled, flowing russet hued hair.
"Forget this Ricardo and come to Marwell with me and be my love instead," he'd whispered.
"I can't, my sweet Mark, my darting. And you haven't done the things you want yet, either. You don't want a wife now, not one who'd be out of place. And I would be in a small town. And my parents wouldn't be happy. They've given me everything and I'm grateful and I love them very much. No, marrying Ricardo is what will make them happy. And you mustn't think I'll be unhappy myself, for I care for him a great deal."
"As much as for me-this way?" he'd gasped as his lips closed over the firming nugget of her dark coral nipple.
And she'd groaned and hugged him and whispered huskily, "Of course not. I've not even been to bed with him yet. That's for our wedding night. And there'll never be anyone else like you in my life-I can't permit it, it would ruin my marriage. No, I'm going to be a faithful wife and love him and give him lots of bambinos. But for now, my darling, just take me and pretend I'm your girl and will always be."
And so, when she'd called yesterday noon to tell him that she was within twenty-four hours of flying to Rome to be with Ricardo and Ricardo's family, with her parents already waiting at the Frascati villa for her, Mark Torrance had known that he had to see Jacqueline Mobry for the last time, cost what it would to his emotions and his now staid professorial routine.
Fortunately, traffic hadn't been heavy because it was a weekday, so he'd made it to Chicago, parked the car in the lot behind the Hilton and freshened up before going into the bar, where she'd said she'd be waiting. He made it as casual as he could-that had always been one of their little rituals, seeming to meet like strangers and pretending it was their very first chance meeting and going on from there. She was sitting at the rear on the upholstered red leather bench with a little cocktail table in front of her, a Bacardi before her, and she was wearing a blue cotton print dress with floral design and a picture hat of matching blue felt, and in profile her oval face had looked provocative and enchanting, as it always did. By great good luck, there had been an unoccupied table right beside her, and he'd ambled over there and seated himself, ordered a bourbon and ginger ale from the pert brunette waitress who had come over at once at the sight of this handsome and very prepossessing young man.
Mark Torrance was indeed the kind of man who would appeal to women, but in a definitely masculine way. Half an inch under six feet tall, with curly dark brown hair and candid blue eyes and a firm mouth and chin and rugged jaw and strong Roman nose, he had a quiet assurance to him that infallibly got him prompt service at the best restaurants in town. He didn't act like an ivory tower professor in the least, and he never wanted to be like that. He had come from a lower middle class family on the West Side of Chicago, played baseball and football in high school (which hid the fact that he was valedictorian), and had been a boys' camp counselor during the summer to earn money for his college tuition. While he was getting his Master's in English lit at Northwestern, he worked Saturdays and Sundays as a waiter in an Evanston restaurant, and during the summer was a lifeguard for the city. By now, both his parents were dead, and his father had left him exactly six thousand dollars' worth of insurance and an excellent library. He knew very well he could never marry Jacqueline Mobry and give her the material luxuries to which she had been born, yet he'd hoped against hope that because of her common sense, she'd bypass that obstacle and marry him just the same.
It hadn't been a first affair for either of them. Jacqueline had been initiated at eighteen, and had purposely had a discreet liaison with a suave, mature bachelor of 35 who happened to be one of her father's business associates, for the sole reason of wanting a healthy amorous experience to rid her of any sentimental and mawkish notions about virginity. There had been two other men after him, one of them almost capturing her heart and her hand in marriage till she discovered that he was being unfaithful to her with a divorcee waitress at the same time that he was professing an undying love for her. And then Mark had come along and saved her from drowning.
As for Mark himself, he was no novice in the tourney of love, either. His father had had a Continental outlook on premarital sex and edified him at an early age on the facts of life, warning him only to be discreet, not to endanger the reputation or virginity of any girl whom he chose as his companion, and documenting him on what to do to keep from being cursed with illegitimate offspring in any liaison he effected.
So his very first venture as ambassador into the courts of Venus had been ecstatic and wholesome, not the fumbling, guilt-ridden disaster it is for so many adolescents. A week before his 17th birthday and graduation with highest honors, Mark proved his manhood with a sultry and flirtatious black-haired olive skinned Mexican girl who had admired his essays and poems in the school annual and coveted Mark's wiry, vigorous young body. His parents had gone to the theater, and Juana blithely invited herself over. She let him undress her and then undressed him herself, her hands and lips making him take joy in his virility. Competent and passionate, she was the ideal initiatress.
There had been two other girls after Juana and before Jacqueline. With one, a blonde stenographer named Alice Meredith, 26 and on the rebound from a breakup with her fianc‚, there had been a torrid affair and he had even thought of marriage, though he had been then five years her junior. He had met Alice in a restaurant one evening on his day off from the boys' camp, and the affair had lasted all summer. She had decided not to get married because her boss had offered her a chance to work with him in a new branch office he was opening in Honolulu, so Mark had gone back to college to finish his degree. And work had helped heal the grief at losing a very beautiful and candidly generous mistress.
For Mark Torrance was a romantic idealist, and it was exactly this rare quality which attracted women to him. He had learned the wise precept that the lover who sees to his sweetheart's satisfaction ahead of his own is--likely to derive far more delight. In Jacqueline Mobry, he believed he had found the ideal woman, passionate and imaginative as the most exotic houri, yet stubbornly loyal and mercilessly self-critical of her own flaws. That was why, as he pretended to have just met her for the first time last night at the Hilton bar, he was feeling as if he were about to attend his own funeral.
They had played their little game for the last time. After a discreet interval, he'd asked her the time, and she'd glanced at her Swiss wristwatch-which cost at least his monthly professorial salary. Then he'd offered to buy her a drink, and they'd sipped it slowly. Then they'd gone to the dining room and enjoyed a leisurely gourmet meal of steak Diane and asparagus cooked with butter, wine and mushrooms, and a bombe surprise and champagne for dessert. And she'd thanked him effusively for dinner, told him she had to leave to catch a plane, and walked out of the dining room while he paid the check. After ambling back to the bar for a nightcap, he went back to the basement lobby and took the elevator to the floor she had designated and knocked softly at the door which bore the number she had whispered into his ear as she rose to leave him.
He'd heard her call "It's unlocked, darling," and gone in and locked the door behind him. Only a little night lamp was burning, and Jacqueline was there on the bed, whose covers were invitingly drawn, wearing the sheerest of black nylon nighties, her magnificent russet tresses cascading down to her shoulders and mantling the white pillow with their shimmering silk. And he had undressed, agony and desire commingling in him at the knowledge that this would be their very last time together. And it had been devastating and delirious, and he hadn't left her till four in the morning to drive back to Marwell. And he had flung himself down on the couch in the living room of his bungalow, not wanting to undress or wash or efface the burning memory of her kisses and caresses. And when he had wakened just before noon this morning, he had felt as if a vital part of his life had ended. The thought of an afternoon class with those simpering girls staring at him and ogling him was almost as bad as having a hangover. But from now on, he was going to have to dedicate himself to that kind of life for a good long while. There wasn't anybody like Jacqueline on campus; there never would be.