A Cup of Tea - Amy Ephron [15]
“Oh, Rose, do I have to?”
She didn’t answer him because she had immediately opened another letter and was distracted by its contents. A sort of florid card, one you would buy at a dimestore, not the usual engraved stationery. She opened the card which had a note written on it and some money stuffed inside it.
“I hate it when you don’t answer me,” he said. “Is this what I have to look forward to—years and years as a neglected…husband?”
Rosemary interrupted him. “Philip, she’s sent me back my money.”
He knew instantly who she meant.
“I never expected her to repay me,” Rosemary said. “Do you remember that girl I picked up?”
“Who?” he said, appearing to still be distracted.
“You know. Miss Smith. The one I picked up that day in the rain and brought home for tea. Do you think maybe I helped her?” Rosemary looked very pleased with herself.
On the couch, Philip has shut his eyes.
The shops were closing for the night. The streets were crowded with taxis, carriages, people on their way home on foot or running to catch the streetcar, women with children hanging on their skirts making hurried stops in food-stores and the apothecary shop on the corner which closed conveniently a half-hour after everyone else.
The street lamps were just coming on as Eleanor came out of the hat shop and found Philip’s carriage parked on the corner. He’d let his driver go and was holding the reins of the two chestnut mares himself, a driver’s cap pulled down over his forehead. Despite it, she recognized him at once. He’d rolled the window down as if he were waiting for her. “Did we have an appointment?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, “I wanted to see you.” He smiled at her and she remembered again how charming he was but it didn’t deter her.
“Oh. And I’m here whenever you want to see me. In between the other things?” She started to walk away from him down the crowded street.
Did he think she was going to be easy? No, if he’d thought that, he wouldn’t have been interested in her.
He started to follow her in the carriage. “You’re making a scene,” he said, casually, as if he were amused by her.
“I’m making a scene?”
He smiled again.
“Don’t you care?” she asked him, surprised that he would take a chance like this.
“I just thought we could have dinner,” he said as politely as he could.
“Actually have dinner. I actually have other plans.”
“Another time, then,” he said. He closed the window and the carriage took off down the street. And then as abruptly as this began, it ended. It wasn’t clear who’d won this exchange.
He didn’t feel like going to his club where there would certainly be talk of war. He directed his driver instead to take him to Jane Howard’s.
Jane Howard and Philip Alsop had been friends since they were children, since before Philip’s father died. She remembered when he lived in the big house on the corner of 9th Street and Fifth Avenue, when he wore short pants and had a pony of his own, when his mother was still beautiful before the hardships of her life ravaged her once unlined face.
He had always confided in her, never questioned her loyalty to him and with good reason, as Jane had always been the person in his (and Rosemary’s) life whom they told their darkest secrets to, and she, in turn, had incited them to do things she would never have done herself. They had the kind of comfort with each other that cousins had, a mischievous conspiratorial streak from too many unchaperoned hours when they were children and the grown-ups were busy doing whatever grown-ups did on idle summer afternoons and evenings.
Jane was standing at the mantel with her back to the room smoking a cigarette. Philip was lying on the couch. She had offered him wine which he declined preferring something stronger, whiskey neat, and was on his second glass.
“It’s like an addiction,” he said with some excitement and a small degree of distress.
Jane turned to him and took a long draw on her cigarette. “She has that effect. Certainly on me.”
Philip looked at her as though they had a mutual understanding.