Chapter 6
"Didn't stay long," Maggie remarked as Susanne whisked into the apartment.
"Forgot my keys." Then hurriedly, "I wanted to pick up some books I saw in Miss Mary's office."
"Duplicates in the thinking room," Maggie told her, and trotted out so Susanne couldn't see the triumph on her face.
Susanne went into the thinking room, but she did not go immediately to the bookcase Maggie had indicated.
She had analyzed the image in the mirror at the salon entrance; now she had to fix it in her mind.
Sparkle, she called it. A girl or woman could be perfect in feature, exquisitely groomed, beautifully dressed. But without sparkle, without that touch of sunshine that came from within, she was not attractive.
She thought of the display at the entrance. Without the glint of gold, it would do little for one chancing to see it.
Now how to isolate its secret so she could have it to use when she needed it? What was it? Sparkle, yes, but what was sparkle?
Above all, how did one raise a sparkle?
Pacing the floor brought no answer. Susanne sat in a deep chair, the arms of which were designed to hold note pad and pencil. She tumbled through books, words. arresting her attention here and there. She made notes. But she found no sparkle.
"Dinner," Maggie informed her from the doorway, "is fair growing cold. I called you twice."
"You did?"
Susanne followed her back to the dinette and looked down. Street lights were coming on, cutting the gloom with sparkle; shimmering arcs that turned a drab world into a thing of beauty.
"Maggie," she began thoughtfully, "if you found something that made a person beautiful, an inside thing, how would you go about isolating it? I mean, finding out what brought it about?"
"Figure I'd study the folks as had it alongside them as hadn't." As simple as that.
"Maggie, this is the very best dressing that ever came to rest inside of a chicken. Besides, I love you."
"Getting kind of a soft spot for you, too. Now don't eat up too much. Made a Dutch chocolate cake."
Susanne retired early and slept deeply. She'd done one bit of mind searching. Costume jewelry, junk jewelry. How she had scorned it. Well, just let the stores open, and she, Susanne Morgan, would soon be going around looking like a Christmas tree.
If I sparkle outside first, she reasoned, maybe I'll reflect something inside. Meanwhile, I'll study people.
She awakened to a fresh approach.
"Looking chipper this morning," Maggie remarked as she poured Susanne's coffee.
"Foot in the door. Fresh air coming in."
Fortunately Maggie had spent twenty years with Miss Mary. She had learned to wait.
"I," Susanne informed her, "have been going around with a closed mind. Once I had accepted the fact that something was not authentic, I closed my mind, locked the door and threw away the key. And I have despised opinionated people."
Maggie nodded. "Miss Mary always said quickest way to spot an ignorant person was to notice they thought they knew every answer. She waited a moment, then added, "I could shorten that dress you laid out to wear in twenty minutes."
She gave Susanne a vast chest of costume jewelry to rifle as she worked, and Susanne considered the baubles and herself.
Had she not inherited the Hair-After, she would have gone on through life an aging college girl. Now she realized that what was correct on the campus was not necessarily so elsewhere.
She had met some of the species at homecomings, still wearing a reasonable facsimile of the clothes they had worn twenty years before; their minds, she didn't doubt, also clothed in the restrictions of their particular era.
They were smug, self-satisfied.
"There," Maggie smoothed the lines of an old campus dress around Susanne; "you need some heels now."
"I'd fall on my face with those horrible stilts."
"Probably," agreed Maggie. "Body going to climb a ladder don't start on the top rung."
"Oh," said Susanne.
She was quite late reaching the salon. Henri, back to the entrance, was talking earnestly to a young salesman. He heard a low whistle from the man and wheeled.
He didn't believe it. Susanne Morgan was wearing a dress definitely not a Julienne, yet looking as gay and brisk as a stand of autumn foliage in the sunshine.
The brown frock had a tiny line of coral. Now that coral was picked up, intensified in the knotted strand of coral and gold beads at her throat. And she wore heels; not tall ones, but heels. Yet she'd insisted upon flatties even with her Julienne ensemble the night of their date.
"Miss Susanne Morgan," Henri reported dutifully but in a dull voice. For if she could change this much in one week, what would she become in six months? And he had started this.
Half an hour later, a bemused salesman tottered out of the Hair-After. His order was but half of what Henri had proposed, but Henri had been called to the appointment, and Miss Susanne had admitted her ignorance and put the salesman on his honor.
"Oh, well," he soothed his salesman's conscience, "for some reason Henri's padding the stock. Wonder why? Could be one way to make the outgo seem more than the income."
Susanne waited until he had left, then scooped a crumpled order blank from the wastebasket where the salesman had tossed it.
Carefully she scanned it. This was the order Henri and the salesman had been drawing up when she came in. In another moment she had opened a file to check on the October (to be delivered in November) orders of the previous year; to compare those with the crumpled sheet and then with the one the salesman had finally filled out.
Inventory would be taken within two months of this order's delivery. The previous year's order had taken cognizance of that. It tallied with the final order made out in her presence.
When the bookkeeper came in after lunch, Susanne was ready with questions. Did the Hair-After use the end of the calendar year as the end of its fiscal year? It did? What taxes would be based in inventory of that period?
"County, state and federal."
"Ha," said Susanne. Then why should Henri, who had warned her of a seasonal slump after the first of the year, want to carry over an excess load of supplies?
She made a swift trip to the apartment to face Maggie.
"I'm ready to ask questions. How important is Henri to the salon?"
"Well, now," Maggie sank into a kitchen chair, "your Aunt Mary said having Henri as an employee was a lot like having a certain kind of husband. You couldn't get along with him; neither could you get along without him. So you figured which was worse and worked from there."
"Why couldn't she get along without him?"
"Has a way with the ladies. He's like a small boy. Part of the time you want to slap him down, but when you do you want to pick him up and ease the hurt. Right valuable to the salon, and he does know his business."
"What's his background?"
Maggie smiled. "Figure from that, Henri's aiming to take over command. Natural, him being the oldest one there and knowing the most, and you being young."
"Just take over?" mused Susanne. "But he would not do anything dishonest?"
"As in stealing? No. Could be he'd manipulate to prove himself the smarter. Now if I was young, I'd handle Henri, smart like. I'd ask him to help me. Then you'd have him."
And Susanne sailed back to the salon to bend a head that looked wearily over the books until Henri's shadow, returning from the appointment book, hovered nearby. "Henri," she breathed, "I am so glad you caught that salesman trying to overload us this morning. Now please, whenever one comes in, do call me so I can learn from you. Promise?"
A baffled Henri promised, looked at Susanne's head and murmured, "We'd better use a golden tint next time. More effective under these lights."
Maybe, thought Susanne, she was pushing guile to thwart duplicity, but Henri would be the better next day, and she didn't wonder he considered himself slightly above par.
She caught a glimpse of her first sparkle the next day. Surprisingly it came from Henri. Or was it a mere reflection?
Intent upon her research, as outlined by Maggie, she had been watching girls and women enter the salon and leave; plain girls, pretty ones, beautiful ones.
Now she saw Henri sparkle and thought: My goodness, he is handsome when he lights up like that.
Eagerly she waited for the patron to turn around and then all but gasped. The woman was eighty if she was a day, yet there was that about her which caused every head to turn toward her.
"Who on earth is she?" Susanne whispered to Dove.
"A Mrs. MacGregor. Isn't she a love? We always feel better after a visit from her."
No, she was anything but wealthy. Her one extravagance was having her hair done. "She doesn't know of the increase in charges," Dove began, then glared at Susanne.
"You mean we do not charge her current fees?" her makes up the difference. It's worth it to us. Usually it's Henri. He even went to her funny little apartment last winter when she was recuperating from influenza."
Oh, darn Henri, thought Susanne, just when she had worked up a healthy distrust of him.
"Then it's the operators who make her sparkle."
"No, I imagine it's those jet and silver beads, or the crystal ones. Or maybe it's something inside. I don't know. She thinks life is wonderful."
"Isn't it?"
But Dove's late appointment had arrived.
Susanne debated a moment. Should she tell the operators not to charge Mrs. MacGregor anything? No, she wasn't the type to enjoy that. Ah, then, she'd have the operators deduct the difference from the salon rather than from their own billfolds.
And deprive them of sharing?
Another sparkle arrived the next day, a small one, but brilliant: a girl stopping over between trains who did hope they could squeeze her in. She wanted to look outside as she felt inside, she confided.
Henri and Bettine, ready to bring Susanne another step upward toward their idea of what the Hair-After's proprietress should look like, were a little shocked.
"Do take her," urged Susanne, "and let me watch."
She had meant listen, though she heard little enough. Relaxed under first Henri's and then Bettine's fingers, the customer promptly went to sleep, was awakened to be led to a dryer, and dozed again. Brought back for a final loosening of waves, she stared and clapped her hands.
"I just knew I could look like that. Isn't it wonderful? Oh, my, the time!" And after paying, she was gone.
Henri followed Susanne home that night, after they had made a quick call to Maggie.
When he removed combs and rollers and stood back awaiting Maggie's praise, even Susanne was surprised. She looked positively stunning, her head a delicately shining orb, each strand of hair accentuating a feature.
Yet Henri seemed just as delighted at this success in tossing together a salad under Maggie's admiring gaze.
Bert Leehoff would choose that moment to bring papers to be signed. After a startled glance at Susanne, he sat sternly in a chair Maggie proffered, completely spoiling their dinner, he having had his.
In the living room, which looked down on the sparkling lights of the city on one side and upon the sparkling lights of low hills on another, there was a moment's strained silence.
"How is business?" asked Leehoff.
Solemnly Henri shook his head.
"But, Henri," protested Susanne, "we haven't an open appointment."
"At this time of the year, with football games and dances, ice hockey getting under way, country clubs transferring their activities from golf to bridge, we should be rushed."
Bert said it was natural there should be a temporary slump following what was literally a change of ownership.
"Expansion," Henri intoned solemnly. "We need to expand. We can't. Nor can we adequately handle those we have unless they come in chauffeured cars."
"That," stated Bert, "will be handled in due time. Not that I am conceding a need for expansion as yet. You have quality clientele. Suppose you expanded; could you hold your regulars if the atmosphere of the salon changed?"
The argument was brisk, even a little sharp, and Susanne listened, intrigued.
"Would you say a dentist with offices in the core area needs more patients?" Bert demanded.
A call from Danny Harper brought the argument and the evening to a close. This time Maggie didn't hesitate. She brought the telephone in to plug it in at Susanne's elbow.
Danny, it seemed, had reached his destination and picked up a "through" load to Los Angeles. Unless he was sidetracked from there, he'd be home in no time.
The other two men left as she started to talk. Maggie, handing them their topcoats, remarked brightly, "Miss Susanne sure is looking pretty these days."
"She is," agreed Leehoff anxiously.
"Hm," said Henri thoughtfully. Again, he had brought this on himself. Now if old Ames were handling the estate, he'd have had no worries. But this young know-it-all, unengaged, could see a potential in Miss Susanne which would mean trouble for one Henri, who really knew more about the business than the two of them would ever learn.
Then there was this Danny person who often telephoned across the continent. He should call at the office; then he could write it off as a business expense, though what a truck would be needing with a beauty salon he didn't know.
But those calls were wasteful, profligate. Let this Danny see the possibilities in the Hair-After, and he'd marry her, fast.
Ames, prodded by Leehoff, made a few well-chosen calls, and promptly Susanne was invited to join the Business Women's Club, to Chamber of Commerce luncheons, and to a dinner for Citizens' Green Light.
The Hair-After came into new focus. It was now not merely a beauty salon; it was a cog in a great wheel, of equal importance with all other cogs, and she had to be responsible to the whole if all were to revolve economically.
This did take time from the salon, but she seemed to be there when she was needed.
She was on this particular afternoon. A regal woman had been arguing with Henri for twenty minutes before, with uplifted palms, he brought her to Susanne.
"She has come from the Mediterranean; took a side trip to Cairo where a friend has given her this powder, used by famous beauties. Me, I do not know the contents. I fear to use it lest we subject ourselves to a damage suit."
"Henri," cried the woman, "you know I would never do that. Besides, this is so simple. It is no more than the henna originally used in this country, or something similar. The best, naturally, did not reach our shores."
Henna? Susanne sighed, looked at the warring couple, recognized the woman as one wielding great social power, and bowed her head.
"Shall we try it on my hair first?" she asked.
"Excellent," cried the woman. "I'll return in an hour."
Henri hesitated only a moment, then, receiving a whispered message from Jensen, nodded. "Say in an hour," he ordered, and drew Susanne to his lair.
Susanne thought her hair looked a little dark when the shampoo and pack were over. But it would, naturally, And it would wash out. Henri spent little time setting it.
She read happily under the dryer; then, the patron back, was whisked in for the final touch.
"Oh," she breathed when net and curlers were removed, "oh, my!"
She had not auburn, or red, lilac, mauve or lavender, but brilliant royal purple hair.
And standing behind her, reflected above the purple, was a face that nearly matched its color: Danny Harper's.