of sculpture I’ve ever seen. She was waiting in the hallway when we arrived and gushed all over us again, but you could tell she still didn’t know our names. Nobody was introduced. There were about three or four other guests and she hustled us all into the dining room. She sat Paul next to an absolutely gorgeous elegant middle-aged man, so I guessed that he was the one she wanted him to meet. You could see he took to Paul immediately and after hearing him play he was just in raptures. He gave him his card, and said he wanted to have a long, serious talk with him the next day, and he invited him down to his château for the week end, where he said he was going to put his special Bachstein Grand at Paul’s disposal, and see to it that no one disturbed him from practicing to his heart’s content, and then he suddenly laughed, he had this strange excited, high-pitched laugh, more of a giggle really, and he rumpled Paul’s hair and said he’d just realized he didn’t even know our names. When we told him he closed his eyes and murmured—Pablo Galache—sort of softly. It turned out he was Spanish, too. He asked us how we happened to have a Spanish name, so we told him about Mummy and Daddy and their elopement, and all and my gosh you can’t imagine the change that came over him! I think he must have gone crazy. He looked like he was going to choke. “José Alvarez de Galache?” he whispered. His voice was so husky you could hardly hear him. We were surprised at him knowing our father’s name. “He was one of my oldest friends,” he said, “I knew him all his life.” Then he leaned forward and began glaring at Paul— I honestly thought he was going to hit him—but he did something just as strange—he took his card back. What do you think of that? Then he sort of pulled himself together, and stood up, and bowed to me, and wished Paul success, and said he hoped we could all meet again under different circumstances—whatever that meant. I mean we just sat there with our mouths open. Then he gave the Contessa an absolutely deadly look and hissed something at her about being careful in the future to whom she introduced him, and flounced out.
“I watched him walk down the hallway, and when he noticed his card still in his hand, he tore it into tiny pieces and flung it on the floor. Can you imagine that? I wonder what came over him? You’d think being such an old friend of Daddy’s he would have reacted in just the opposite.… What’s the matter, Sally Jay?”
I was off on my old space kick again, aimlessly prowling around the room. “Nothing … nothing …” I answered vaguely. What was now crystal-clear was that there had never been any question of Teddy having to trap the Contessa into doing his dirty work; she would have done any kind of dirty work he wished. I felt a little sick. “They are corrupt—corrupt,” I kept saying to myself, over and over again, as I paced around the room. It was the first time I’d ever used that word about people I actually knew, and again the idea that I could take a moral stand—or rather, that I couldn’t avoid taking one—filled me with the same confusion it had that morning. And now they’ve got their mitts on Larry, I thought. Oh Lord. If I don’t stop thinking about those two, I decided, they’re going to put me right off sex for good.
“Ouf!” In my travels around the room I had tripped over Jim, whom I had completely forgotten was even there.
“Hey, what’s this?” I looked at the scrap of paper on which he was scribbling. It was a sketch of Judy and myself. We looked like a couple of wild women, yapping away together on her bed; it only needed those little balloons filled with exclamation marks popping out of our mouths to complete it. I had to laugh.
“Have you been listening to us all this time?”
He grinned and looked at it too. “It would have been difficult not to.”
“Well, what do you make of all this?”
“Not too much.” He was putting the finishing touches to his work. “You girls. You really know some birds, don’t you?” He chuckled mildly.
I was amazed. I wouldn’t have expected Judy to see the point of her story, but a man … I stared