Mistral's Daughter (30 page)

"All I know is that
somewhere I must have a
yellow glove, I'm a much-gloved woman,"
Maggy said, wondering, why on
earth, if she were going to plot to be
alone with a man, the blond girl had picked out a
pédé.

"Whatever you all
decide," Darcy agreed.
 
"But
let's get going
—
we've wasted five minutes already."

Downstairs, on Park Avenue,
Darcy handed Maggy into a
long limousine.
 
"Twenty-one East Fifty-second
Street," he said to the chauffeur sitting in an open box.

"I suspected Lally was
going to spring another scavenger hunt so I told the car to wait," he told
Maggy.

The enormous dark blue
Packard, which would have seemed appropriate for J. P. Morgan himself, was only
one of the ways in
which Jason Darcy set himself apart from other young
men of his age.
 
The only son of a
wealthy Hartford insurance company owner, he'd been considered one of the most
brilliant men of his class at Harvard, graduating at eighteen.
 
In the following years he had borrowed family
money to launch three new magazines, each of which had become immediately
successful in that booming era.

The money soon repaid, Darcy
used his large income to live as well as a pasha entitled to display three
horsetails.
 
He had affairs with an
astonishing percentage of all the prettiest women in New York, whom he bothered
only to divide into two basic categories, treating the society ladies like
chorus girls, and the chorus girls
like society ladies, an arrangement
that somehow ensured everyone’s pleasure.
 
No one woman had managed to catch him and the ever-growing band of his
disappointed, temporary flames all drifted toward the face-saving conclusion
that he was married to his work.

Jason Darcy was a genuinely
influential man who risked becoming self-important. Unfortunately for his
character, he'd never wanted anything he couldn't manage to obtain; not the
admiration of his peers or his own self-esteem.
 
For the moment Maggy was bauble he had decided to acquire. Twice, during
dinner, he had caught her eye although they had been seated at different
tables.
 
Gay Barnes, nitwit that she was,
had shown a most convenient sense of timing in splitting up the team, although
if there hadn’t been the excuse of the scavenger hunt he would simply have
taken more direct measures.

Maggy was jolted by the
memory of Perry's dove-gray Voisin as
she leaned back into the deep,
soft cushion of the Packard.
 
She’d
forgotten how such a car made her feel, cossetted, a rare object
made of
precious materials, fitted into a velvet nest.
 
Nothing, no perfume she knew, smelled as sensuous as the interior of a
limousine.

She glanced at Darcy with
mild interest.
 
He had a long, thin face
of infinite distinction, a scientist's face or a philosopher's face, she
thought, in spite of his youth. I t was a face that was sharp with cool
curiosity, yet he looked as if he could never be surprised.
 
He moved with economy and grace; he had a
straight, gray gaze in which she suspected some humor must lurk, and a straight
hard mouth
that looked as if it could be capable of great scorn.
 
His dark hair
fit
closely to
his head, and he was easily a few inches taller than she was.
 
A man like a blade, she thought, and
dismissed him from her mind.
 
The
limousine was so much more potent an excitement than any mere man could be.

She was disappointed when the
ride ended too quickly and they entered the permanent carnival of Jack and
Charlie's, the most clublike and most expensive speakeasy in New York, a
wood-paneled cave of jovial shouts and hearty defiance of the Volsted
Act,
which opened at lunch and didn't close until dawn.
 
It was the daily hangout for a merry mix of
Ivy League undergraduates, sports writers and stockbrokers and it roared with
the complex, excited noise that can only be made by a lot of happy people
drinking, eating, laughing and flirting in an overcrowded room.

They were quickly shown to a
table and Darcy ordered champagne, conferring a moment with the waiter.
 
Maggy, still longing to return to the
limousine, sat restlessly, until the waiter poured the wine.

"Isn't that a
waste?" she asked. "We can't drink the whole bottle
—
just
look at this list
—
the English butler, the policeman's hat...
 
what time is it?"
 
Her competitive spirit had begun to
rise.
 
This was hardly an appropriate
moment in which to sit around lazily and sip bootleg booze, no matter how
authentically French it was.

Darcy gave her a complacent,
rather too lofty look.
 
"I've just
arranged to rent our waiter's jacket.
 
I'll phone home and tell my butler to meet us on Lally's sidewalk with
my copy of Hemingway
—
Clarkson used to work for the Duke of Sutherland
—
and we can pick up that yellow glove you said you had on the way
back."

"Is that your idea of
sportsmanship?" Maggy frowned.
 
This
man was draining all the fun out of it, with his smugness and his showing off.

"I call it basic
wisdom.
 
We didn't take a blood oath to
win
—
just to play.
 
Anyway,
aren't you bored stiff by scavenger hunts?"

"Most certainly
not!
 
I've never been on one before.
 
What gives you the right to turn this evening
into drinks for two?" she snapped.
 
How she hated them, men who thought they could dominate women.

He didn't answer but drank
his wine and looked intently into the world of her angry, challenging green
eyes.
 
He could feel himself respond to
her quality, one which seemed to him to be untamed in the deepest sense but yet
well under control.
 
He didn't know anything
about her, but she could never be anonymous.

"Where did Lally
discover you?" he asked.
 
"And
why have we never met before."

"I work at Alberto
Bianchi's," she said curtly.

"What do you do
there?"
 
So she was another one of
those women who never worked a day in their lives before, who had accepted a
"funny little job" to show how undaunted they were by the Depression.

"I model dresses...
 
other women buy them."
 

"I rather tend to doubt
that."

"It's quite true."

"You mean you're a
genuine
victim of the Crash, you work for a
living
?"

`
   
"For fifty dollars a week. I do very well, as it
happens."

"Tell me
everything," he invited, confident that she'd like nothing more. What
woman didn't?

"Everything? You're
damned
rude, do you know that?
 
Why
should I tell you anything at all?
 
I
don't even think I caught your name, whatever it may be.
 
You've ruined my scavenger hunt and now
you're being utterly presumptuous.
 
What's more, you didn’t even ask me if I like champagne before you
ordered it."

"You're absolutely
right," he said, taken aback.
 
"I apologize profoundly
.
 
Would
you like something else to drink?"

"This is quite enough,
thank you," Maggy said.
 
She, look
around her, paying him
no further attention.

"Mrs. Lunel, I'm Jason
Darcy and I'm twenty-nine years old and I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, of
a respectable family.
 
I’ve never been to
jail, I don't cheat at poker, I love animals, my mother speaks highly of me,
and I usually have better manners than I've led you to believe."

"Is that quite
'everything'?" Maggy asked, permitting him a small smile.

"I'm a publisher,
Mode,
Women's Journal
and
City and Country Life
.''

"
Tiens, tiens
,
three magazines for just one man," she said.
 
"Just what precisely does a publisher
do?
 
Besides being obnoxiously
inquisitive with unknown ladies?"

"Precisely? I'm the
boss."

"What an unilluminating
explanation.
 
Who do you boss and why do
you boss?
 
Be more exact, if you
please."

He looked at her, catching
her scarcely hidden mockery.

"Couldn't you be a
little more impressed?"

"Should I be? I have no
idea just what a publisher does."

"I invented the
magazines, I decided how they should look, I targeted in on my public, I
established the standards, the formats.
 
The editors report to me, and so do the business departments and
everybody who physically produces the magazines."

"Is that a publishing
empire?" Maggy asked.
 
"Like
the publishing empire of Mr. Hearst, for example?"

"Mine's more like a
kingdom than an empire," Darcy admitted.

 
"How modest of you, Mr. Darcy."

"You don't feel any
particular delight at drinking champagne with a fairly important
publisher?"

"I'm far too old and too
wise for astonished delight, Mr. Darcy."

"Darcy."

"Darcy.
 
What little I've seen of the world has left
me blasé, jaded, spoiled and, worst of all, hungry."

"So soon after
dinner?"

"Dinner is a meal that
invariably leaves me hungry."

"How about some chicken
hash?
 
It's a specialty here:"

"Leftovers, how
childishly barbarian."
 
Maggy hadn't
felt so impulsive, so to-hell-with-it-all, so intoxicatingly, splendidly silly
since she had arrived in the United States.
 
Ah, but it was droll to make an utter fool of a man again, she
thought.
 
Men had been invented to become
fools
—
that was
all
they were good for, that and no more.
 
Paula had said so and Paula had been right.

Jason Darcy couldn't stop
looking at Maggy.
 
She'd shot off more
flames than a black opal, with those golden-greeny eyes and her orange hair,
shining smooth over the lovely shape of her skull, breaking into deep waves
just under her chin
—
she had the flushed brilliance of a child running
loose in the first snow of winter.
 
Who
the hell was Maggy Lunel?
 
Not a chorus
girl or a society woman.
 
And yet he was
sure he knew all of the most beautiful women of the city.

"I've got it!
 
You're a new Powers girl."

"And what might that
be?" Maggy asked curiously.
 
Recently she'd
heard the phrase flung about more and more but
she'd never had the time or interest to ask about this odd Americanism.

"A photographic model,
with the John Robert Powers agency
—
Come on, stop looking as if you
didn't know."

"Truly, I'm not involved
in that world.
 
I merely model copies of
Paris originals and help to run society fashion shows.
 
The House of Bianchi has never used a Powers
girl."

"Well, it's just a
question of time before you do because Powers is getting bigger all the
time.
 
He's been in business for a couple
of years, ever since the ad agencies and magazines all started using photographs
instead of drawings."

"And what do these
Powers girls make when they work?"

"As I remember they
started at five dollars an hour in the first days
but now the top girls
are getting fifteen."

"Fifteen an hour!
 
That's a fortune!"
 
Maggy was awed.

"Damn right, especially
if a girl works a lot and they're all getting busier and busier in spite of
the Depression.
 
Today either a business
has to advertise or it goes under, and nothing sells a product like a pretty
girl."

"And Mr. John Robert
Powers, what does he earn?"

"Ten percent of whatever
his models make."

"And how many models
does he have working for him?"
she persisted.

"I'm not sure
—
I'd imagine about a hundred, including the men and the kids.
 
If you're really only a fifty-dollar-a-week
dress model you should be working for him."

"Thank you," Maggy
said absently.