Mistral's Daughter (15 page)

"I
wish
I had a
brother," he said, with admiration.

"Oh, so do I!"

During that first awkward
dinner, as Paula devoted herself to her oysters
—
for one may bring
people together but after that they must fend for themselves
—
Perry
Kilkullen saw clearly that underneath Maggy's tense exterior there was a deep
and terrible grief, a heavy burden of sadness she could hardly attempt to
hide.
 
This encouraged him more than if
she had been gay because it meant that she must be suffering, and whatever it
was, he meant to cure it.
 
The operetta
of sound that filled the bright, busy restaurant just off the place d'Alma was
a background for the luxurious low charm of her sad voice in which there was a
mourning note of which she was unaware.
 
He was prepared for enchantment but, as the dinner went on, he was
appalled by the recklessness of his emotions, appalled and unafraid.

In the weeks that followed he
courted her as gentlemen had courted ladies when he had been unmarried, in the
early years of the 1900s.
 
For all the
youthfulness of his forty-two years, Perry Kilkullen's manners were marked by
Edwardian grace, by the restraint of a period in which there was ample time for
all things.

Maggy's apartment was filled
with baskets of flowers that arrived every day from Lachaume, but he did not
permit himself to offer her anything else.
 
He walked up the rue de la Paix every morning as he left the Ritz and
looked wistfully at the entrance to Cartier.
 
He would have liked to rush in and buy her
—
anything,
everything!
—
but he knew it was utterly inappropriate.
 
As often a she would agree, he took her out
to dinner.
 
In an era in which evening
clothes were the rule at the grand restaurants, he bowed to her desire to go to
simpler places where she was comfortable in her little chemises and her black
cape. Gently, as if she were a rare, wild
bird, he led her to talk to
him of her childhood, of her grandmother, of Rabbi Taradash and the gang of
young rascals she had been a member of less than two years before.
 
In turn he told her his legendary relative,
"Honest Ned Kilkullen," who took on the power of Tammany Hall and won
—
for a while
—
and he explained to her the difference between
the Irish and all other immigrants to the United States.

"They love a good fight,
Maggy, and they love a good song.
 
They're scrappy and devilishly proud and they'll do anything to win
freedom and justice as they see it.
 
They
always think they're in the right, of course, even when they're wrong, but
that's just Irish fire.

"I think I'd like the
Irish," she said, amused at his fervor.

Suddenly Perry saw a vision
of his wife in whom the Irish fire had been quenched years ago, if indeed, the
Eastern seaboard stiffness that had been drilled into her by her governess had
left any fire burning.
 
Mary Jane
Kilkullen had turned into a dry, duty-bound committee woman whose name evoked
dim images of a big antique-filled apartment in which the valuable silver was
always highly polished and the fine linen sheets freshly ironed; of a golf ball
neat hit; a cocktail perfectly mixed, but no memories came to him of the
feeling of her hair under his hand, of her scent or her lips.
 
As quickly as her image had drifted into his
mind it faded.
 
Reality was the roundness
of Maggy's shoulder, the unquenchable spangled flash of her eyes, set so far
apart on her face that they had that touch of peculiarity without which mere
beauty is empty.

Two weeks of this gracious courtship
passed and Perry Kilkullen, who had been able to be so direct with Paula, began
to damn himself more as day followed day and he realized that he was paralyzed
by the power of his feeling for Maggy.
 
He felt that he'd been turned back into a timid adolescent who hesitates
to even reach out a hand to the girl he loves for fear of rebuff. How, he asked
himself, as he neglected his correspondence and forgot to return phone calls,
how had he allowed a situation to develop between them in which he was behaving
like some sort of benign, doting
uncle
?

Another week went by before
Maggy, who couldn't avoid realizing how much he seemed to cherish her, started
observing him for signs of what Paula, as inquisitive as an old concierge,
called his "intentions."
 
She
had never known a man could be so gallant or so shy.
 
One night, as they finished a massively
gastronomic dinner at Le Grand Véfour, Maggy discovered that she suddenly felt
like dancing.
 
It was more than a
feeling, she explained gravely to Perry, it was a physical necessity.

"Where?" he asked,
delighted at an interruption in what seemed to be an endless series of meals.

"Le Jockey," she
answered.
 
Maggy hadn't returned to any
of the Montparnasse nightclubs or bistros or cafes since the
vernissage.
 
On the Right Bank, she had been as unlikely to
bump into Mistral or any of their scandal-loving friends as if she'd taken an
ocean voyage, but tonight when she chose Le jockey it was a sign that she
didn't care
whom she might encounter, for it was the artists' favorite
nightclub, so casual that they often went there in their painting clothes.

Perry and Maggy soon found
themselves jammed into the narrow, dark room that was perhaps the noisiest
place in Paris.
 
Owned by two men, one a
painter, the other a former steamship steward, the walls and ceiling of the
first and most famous Montparnasse nightclub were decorated like a Western
saloon, covered with posters pasted up in every direction, punctuated here and
there by blackboards on which saucy limericks were written in American
slang.
 
Lee Copeland, an ex-cowboy,
played the piano, accompanied by two Hawaiian guitarists, and if they grew
tired, a phonograph beat out the latest jazz and blues records from the United
States.

A tribal and primitive
excitement throbbed in the tiny Jockey for the four years of its brief,
legendary existence, and every night limousines, like Perry's, swung to a stop
before the black walls of the club, on which Indians and cowboys had been
painted in bright colors, and couples who had fled formal balls quickly
disappeared inside to drink endless glasses of whiskey and dance in a delirium
all night long.
 
A record was blaring out
the "Black Bottom" from George White's
Scandals
as Maggy and
Perry sat down. On the tiny dance floor couples were flailing around madly.

"Hell
—
I don't
know how to do that one" Perry said in
exasperation.

"I don't either
—
I haven't been here in months."
 
Maggy sipped
her whiskey.
 
"You could break an arm out there."

Then Lee Copeland slid into
the first phrase of "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Perry grinned in
relief. "I can manage that
—
shall we?"

Maggy rose, and in a reflex,
kicked off her shoes.
 
It was the first
time he had held her in his arms and the eloquence of the body was
never
more immediate as in that moment when they touched.
 
Physical compatibility is a question of skin
first and foremost.
 
If the
 
contact of one skin on another isn't
immediately
pleasing nothing else can possibly matter, but if it is, all other things
may follow.

One of the great simplifications
of life took place when ballroom dancing was invented.
 
It was no accident that for years far-sighted
matrons refused to let their daughters waltz.
 
Once a man is permitted to put his arms around a woman and move to music
with her, an infinitude of additional arrangements can be contemplated that no
gavotte or minuet had ever led to.

Of all dances known to
Western man in the twenties, the fox trot, or the "Slow" as it is
called in France, was the most dangerous, more fatal by far than the sexual
explicitness of the athletic tango or the exuberant shimmy.
 
A "Slow" is simply an embrace to a
simple step, and the size of the dance floor at Le jockey made even that simple
step almost impossible to take.

As the Hawaiian guitars
wailed out the Gershwin masterpiece, Maggy became magically accessible to Perry
as the constraints he had been imprisoned by for the last three weeks simply
vanished into the melody.

"I'm a
little lamb that's lost in the wood ...

Oh, how I would
try to be good."

The lyric of the imperishably
banal words would be, for Perry the source of an unreasonable happiness as long
as he lived.
 
They held each other until
the music ended and as the piano glided into the next song, they stood still,
clasped together, and looked into
each other's eyes. Without moving a
muscle Maggy gave Perry the feeling that she was in motion, leaning against a
spring wind.

"I could ask him to play
that song again," Perry said longingly.

"Or you could take me
home," Maggy whispered with a curving, poignant note in her voice. Without
letting go of each other's hand, pausing just long enough to drop money at the
table and for Maggy to retrieve her shoes, they walked out of Le Jockey and
into the waiting limousine that took them the few streets to Maggy's tall,
narrow building next to La Pomme d'Or.

Maggy still hummed the melody
as wordlessly, hand in hand, they
climbed the dilapidated badly lit
staircase, toward her fifth-floor room.
 
As they reached the third floor they had to pick their way carefully
between baskets of flowers, still fresh, that had been carefully
deposited
on each tread of the stairs.
 
The
corridor to Maggy's rooms was lined with more baskets and when she opened the
door Perry gasped
—
the huge, gilt-trimmed bed in her bedroom was born
aloft, entirely adrift on a sea of flowers.

"I guess I overdid
it," he muttered.

"A girl can never have
too many flowers."

"There's no place to
sit," he said, bemused.

"And there's no room for
me to make you a cup of coffee."

"And you can't get to
the fireplace to toast a marshmallow."

"And I can't open the
door of the armoire to hang up your coat."

"I'm not wearing a
coat."

"Ah, but that simplifies
things.
 
We have no choice, do we?"

"No.
 
We have to lie down on the bed or stand here
all night."

"My feet hurt," she
said plaintively.

"Then the alternative
—
the alternative..."

In the pause before he kissed
the lips she raised, in that humming second in which everything seemed
possible, in which every happiness was offered, he thought he was approaching a
destination toward which all unknowing he had been traveling all of his
life.
 
And when he bent his mouth to hers
and felt her breath mingle with his, he knew he had arrived.

They stood, kissing in a
field of flowers, for a long time, until their hearts beat so turbulently that
they were both shaking.

"The alternative?"
she murmured and at last they lay down together on top of the quilt and slowly,
with trembling fingers and many kisses Perry got undressed as Maggy watched him
by the dim, pale gold of the streetlamp that filtered up to her window.
 
Naked, he stood startlingly young; without
the fine suit, the vest, the starched linen, he was a man with rumpled thick
blond hair and the long, flat muscles of a skier.

He slipped the thin straps of
her chemise off her shoulders and pushed her dress down to her waist.
 
With one arm he held her up so that she was
half reclining on the bed, as he stroked her from hot neck to her waist, his
warm hand taking possession of her body inch by inch, gentling her down until
she relaxed completely, her head thrown back on the pillow.
 
Now he slid her dress off, threw it down over
a basket of violets and soon she was as naked as he was, her body calm yet
filled with riotous promise as she waited, deliberately and deliciously passive,
for whatever he would do next.
 
He looked
long at the perfect and untroubled youth of her body. Then he molded himself
closely to her as they lay facing each other,
side
by side, almost equal
in height, lips to lips, nipples to nipples, heart to heart.

"Maggy, I love you so.
Will you let me love you?"

"If you don't...
 
if you don't," she threatened with a
quiver of a shivering laugh.
 
"Oh,
yes, love me...
 
darling Perry...
 
love me...
 
don't ask any more questions."