A Cup of Tea - Amy Ephron [40]
“What is it,” she asked as she passed him, “family day? I just saw your wife.” Philip barely reacted as he was trying to register what he hadn’t known before, that he had a child.
“Is it?” he asked looking at Tess.
“Your baby?” she said immediately. “I don’t know. With girls like me you never can be sure. Of course, it’s your baby.” She was almost crying.
Philip stepped into her. He started to kiss her face and smooth away her tears with the palm of his hand.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Believe me when I tell you that I didn’t know.” He realized he respected her more because she’d never told him, that she would never ask him for anything, that any decision he would make would have to be his own.
He lifted her hair softly and kissed her on the nape of the neck. “Believe me,” he said again, softly, “when I tell you that I didn’t know. Shh. I’m here now.” He kissed her on the cheek and then the mouth. “And I’m not going to leave you.”
Before he left, he promised her that he would come back to her that night. He could no longer live with Rosemary…but he had to tell her. Had to make her understand that she would be better off without him, better off with someone who was much more like her kind. In time, he reasoned, she would forgive him. She would find someone else. But how was he to tell her….
He reached in and picked up the baby, his baby, from the carriage and held her to him and then leaned in and kissed Eleanor again.
It was dark when he came home. The steps to the house looked steep, ominous, as though there were more of them than there had been before. There was no easy way to do this, no good time to do this. He stood on the street for a long time considering how he would tell her. And then let himself into the house.
He practically walked into Gertrude who was carrying a silver tray of hors d’oeuvres into the living room. “Damn!” He’d forgotten they were having a dinner party. He went to the living room and poured himself a drink. Charlie Miles, the piano player from the club, had been hired for the evening and was sitting on the bench at the piano. He was dressed in a tuxedo with a ruffled shirt and a 2-cent carnation in his lapel and his arms fairly hung below the seat of the piano bench as he sat there as relaxed as if he were a rag doll.
Charlie Miles started to play a melody with a bass-line that was early speakeasy, haunting, Victorian, but with a hint of blues to come.
Rosemary was upstairs dressing; that is, she had spread four dresses out on the bed and was trying to figure out which one to wear, as if she could reinvent herself and it would all be fine.
She sat down at the vanity. She started to put kohl under her eyes but she was too nervous to sit. She walked back to the bed and picked up a pale blue taffeta dress that was off the shoulder. She was holding it up to herself in the mirror when Philip walked into the room. “Hi, I was—getting worried about you,” she said. “You’re so late. You need to change. You’ll be late for dinner. The Portervilles are coming and the Fergusons…”
“Rosemary,” said Philip trying in vain to stop her going on.
“They have a new baby,” she said. “A boy. I told them not to bring him. I can’t stand it when everyone stands around goo goo over a new baby. It just stops a dinner party cold. And Jane’s coming, I think.”
Philip just stood there looking at her. “Rose, I have something to tell you…” he said.
“Which dress do you like better, dear?” she asked him holding up a beige silk gown that was cut on the bias.
“Rose, stop!” he said more forcefully than he meant to. “Shall we discuss where to put the chair or which necklace you should wear? Or better yet where I should sit? Or where you should place me like that porcelain box over there.”
She put the dress down. “I don’t think of you as a fixture, Philip,” she said. “Sit down, dear,” and then she stopped realizing she’d just directed him again.