A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“My dear, my dear,” she choked, “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

“Go in to her,” he urged. “You’ll have to, you know. You’ve got to see her through it.”

She left him and went toward the door, conscious of a bitter resentment against herself. “You won’t have to be envious of her now, you rotter.”

There was a slight tinge of drugs in the air and the nurse stood unobtrusively over in a corner. There was no one else in the room but Georgia, a pathetic Georgia, her hands lying limply beside her on the covers, palms up.

“Mother!” said Jicky.

“Is it true, Jicky?” she said. “Is it true — I have to be this way from now on?”

“Mother, Scotty’s here with me. You want to see him, don’t you?”

“How can I? Oh, no, how can I?”

“Dearest, Scotty’s your friend—”

This was the test, to try not to gloat when Scotty saw what had happened to Georgia’s looks, to try to feel sorry for him and sorry for her, sorry that the thing he had valued above everything else was gone, sorry that the thing she had been was blighted.

The door opened and he came in.

He gave one swift look as though the bottom had dropped out of something, and Jicky’s heart died within her. He must have cared then, to look that way about it.

Georgia’s voice from the bed, trying to be gay, pleading desperately, then all at once breaking off.

“Is — is anything noticeable? They told me it was the shadow in the glass. Oh, Scotty, I’m so afraid—”

He was standing beside her looking down at her.

“You know better than that,” he said softly. He reached over and put one finger to her brow as if in whimsical camaraderie.

“You’re — you’re marvelous. What did you expect? How could you be otherwise? You think just a little gauze and cotton is going to change you?”

He turned to look at Jicky and there was some kind of detached wistfulness in his eyes she could not fathom. And as they stole out of the room together, Georgia turned her face on the pillow trustfully up to the nurse. “He would tell me, wouldn’t he?” she murmured.

Jicky stood with her back to the closed door. “You’re a brick,” she faltered gratefully. “Poor Mother.”

“A woman will believe what she wants to believe,” he answered.

In the weeks that followed and the months they totaled, he never ceased importuning her to go out with him and she hardly ever went. There was always the shadow of this thing between them. The count had gone back to France, alleging pressing business matters, and was one man very different from another when it came to things like these, Jicky asked herself? Scotty might besiege her with telephone calls and drop in at every turn, but would he have turned to her if what had happened hadn’t — come between? She crushed the thought to her like ground glass and bled herself sick over it.

It was only the two of them now. The dreaded confirmation of her worst fears to be met with in keen strange feminine eyes would still be spared Georgia for a while. Her pleading had to be met too as well as Scotty’s on these occasions.

“Please, dear. Won’t you go with him for my sake, just this once?”

“But there’s nothing I’m fit to be seen in.”

“Wear one of mine then.”

“Oh, what’s the difference? I’ll look like a pig anyway.”

And then Jicky, unhappy to the core, going in to vent her dissatisfaction on him with the particularly ungracious comment: “Mother wants me to, so I’ll go with you.”

At the Lido one night in an atmosphere of cigarettes, aigrettes, and Lehar waltzes, he told her how much he cared for her and she began to cry, blindly furious at herself, without letting him see it, somehow. She would have killed him if he had noticed it. Her chin almost touching her chest, she studied the finely spun web of brilliants that constituted the upper part of her dress, a surface that at close range dislocated the rays of vision and went slightly out of focus, coruscating like some dazzling boiling substance.

This crowd of pretty things around him, such pretty things they were, and he could sit there looking at her guiltily sparkling lashes and talk this way to her? Every jeweled heel that touched the floor spurted its ice-like reflection downward into the heart of the glassy paneling. And women over their partners’ shoulders breathed not air but blue notes that stung their nostrils to a rhythmic frenzy. It was such a good looking crowd, such a good looking crowd. A bandeau of rhinestones and aquamarines fronted Jicky’s brow and behind it a strange swift prayer began to surge.

“Oh, God, make me beautiful in his eyes. Beautiful. In his eyes. In his alone.” And the ultimate admission, wrenched from her with a suffocating sense of humiliation. “Make him love me as I love him.” After which there was nothing more to be prayed for.

“I want you to say that you’ll marry me,” he said. “A man wants all the beauty he can get into his life and so — I want you.”